How many different kinds of evidence do we need to convince ourselves that the economy is slowing dramatically? Consumer price index (CPI) inflation fell to 2.2% in May, but that was put down by facile analysis to plunging food prices and a good monsoon. The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) base year has been moved…
New Delhi, Dec 8 (Reuters) – India’s Gujarat state aims to be a primary focus for foreign investors, particularly in infrastructure like ports, power and roads, the leader of the west coast province said on Monday. “The word industrialization is humming in Gujarat’s air. Above all the government is investor-friendly,” Chief Minister Dilip Parikh told…
‘One has to learn new competencies’ Few of us know that KUMAR MANGALAM BIRLA, Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, produced the critically acclaimed Hindi movie Black. Or that he has taken up pistol shooting as a hobby. Or that his teenage son is a keen photographer, but he knows a thing or two about…
1 December 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Mercedes-Benz India Ltd is bullish about the Indian car market despite the nation’s “feel bad” economy, managing director Till Becker de Freitas said. “There is a ‘feel bad” factor which is not reflected in reality. I know a lot…
10 December 1998 Reuters News English (c) 1998 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 10 (Reuters) – BankAmerica Corp will sell its retail banking business in India but remains committed to its wholesale banking business in the country, a senior bank official said on Thursday. “The bank will continue its wholesale banking business in India,” Josephine…
24 July 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 24 (Reuters) – Japan is keen on expanding investment in India but finds its bureaucracy extremely inflexible, a senior Japanese official said on Thursday. Nobuaki Tanaka, deputy director-general in Japan’s Foreign Ministry, said India accounts for a minuscule 0.25 percent of Japan’s…
29 June 1999 Reuters News English (c) 1999 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, June 29 (Reuters) – Consumer electronics firm Philips India Ltd has shed nearly a third of its staff over the past five years, but is still not slim enough to achieve optimum shareholder value, its chief said. Asked if Philips India, 51 percent-owned…
28 November 1989 Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, NOV 28, Reuters – Political instability in India may be in prospect after inconclusive national elections, but industrialists and economists said they expected business to carry on as usual. They said industry’s energetic growth over the past five years had generated its own…
15 June 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited CALCUTTA, India, June 15 (Reuters) – India is not likely to see a return to one-party rule, a leader of the current ruling coalition said. Jyoti Basu said his Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), which has made a success of multi-party politics, had valuable…
9 December 2003 Reuters News English (c) 2003 Reuters Limited BOMBAY, Dec 9 (Reuters) – India’s largest truck and bus maker Tata, riding a dramatic return to profits and fuelled by new global ambitions, expects to see explosive growth starting in 2006, a senior executive said on Tuesday. Ravi Kant, executive director of the commercial…
9 December 2003 Reuters News English (c) 2003 Reuters Limited BOMBAY, Dec 9 (Reuters) – Hindalco Industries, a leading Indian maker of non-ferrous metals, aims to expand its aluminium and copper capacity through expansion and acquisitions to attain global reach, its managing director said on Tuesday. Hindalco is the flagship of India’s third-largest conglomerate by…
9 January 2005 Reuters News English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited COLOMBO, Jan 9 (Reuters) – The only problem Sri Lanka’s intrepid garment makers faced after a giant tsunami hit two weeks ago was a slight rise in absenteeism at some of the hundreds of garment factories dotting the Indian Ocean island. “In one zone in…
8 January 2005 Reuters News English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited SAMMANTHURAI, Sri Lanka, Jan 8 (Reuters) – Sitting cross-legged on the cramped, bucking floor of a Black Hawk helicopter as it roars above central Sri Lanka’s pristine jungle and muddy rivers, aid has never seemed as complicated. A second U.S. Air Force Black Hawk…
7 January 2005 Reuters News English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited COLOMBO, Jan 7 (Reuters) – More than 30,000 Sri Lankans lost their lives when the tsunami hit their island the day after Christmas, but perversely the economy looks like it will gain from the destruction, analysts said on Friday. The Sri Lankan rupee has been…
India’s economy is barrelling along at a growth rate of over 9 per cent, savings rates are up, investments are up, more jobs are being created, and inflation appears to be under control. So have we hit our stride? Have we chanced upon the right development model for the huge, tumultuous democracy that we are?…
3 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 3 (Reuters) – Software firm Infosys Technologies Ltd is poised to become the first Indian firm to raise new capital through American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), chairman and managing director N.R. Narayana Murthy said on Wednesday. The blue-chip Infosys announced on Tuesday that…
7 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 7 (Reuters) – The speaker of India’s parliament said on Sunday democracy had taken deep root in his country a half-century after independence, and all parties would speak the language of economic reform will go ahead,” Purno Sangma, speaker of the Lok…
8 December 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Dec 8 (Reuters) – Global investors cannot afford to ignore India, but Indian companies need to prove that they can compete in developed markets, Fred Steingraber, chief executive officer of A.T. Kearney Inc., said on Monday. “I don’t think anybody is prepared to…
The Mac II, launched on March 2. 1987, cost $5.500 and was the first computer with a colour graphical interface. Three years earlier Apple had begun selling the LaserWriter. Combined with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) software, the world was waking up to the marvels of desktop publishing. Steve Jobs, who said…
Song sung blue Everybody knows one Song sung blue Every garden grows one If you are of a certain vintage, you will have been moved by these Neil Diamond lines, sung on a hot August night almost exactly 40 years ago. This steamy August, India has been convulsed by the sudden expelling of decades of…
The day this issue of Business Today went to press, IBM Corporation completed one hundred years. What started as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, manufacturing computing scales, time clocks, and even coffee grinders, quickly grew into Big Blue, a vast global presence in computing under Tom Watson. Senior and Junior, building its power on the mainframe. Like…
I remember back in the 1970s, when a new India was just over a quarter of a century old, Geoffrey Moorhouse, in his foreword to his “Calcutta” wrote: “The imperial residue of Calcutta, a generation after Empire ended. is both a monstrous and a marvellous city. Journalism and television have given us a rough idea…
8 June 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, June 5 – The Philippines’ interest payments on its foreign debt will increase by 157 million dollars this year if the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) climbs to an average of 7.5 pct, Central Bank Deputy Governor Edgardo Zialcita said. “Assuming that the uptrend…
30 July 1987 Reuters news (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, July 30 – Foreign debt has suddenly become a dirty phrase in Manila, but any repudiation of the Philippines’ debt could isolate the country financially, economic analysts said. Spurred by President Corazon Aquino’s scathing attack on creditors in her speech at the opening of Congress…
28 August 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Aug 28, Reuter – Buildings blazed and streets shook in Manila today in the capital’s heaviest fighting since World War Two. “Advance, advance,” civilian spectators shouted to soldiers backing Corazon Aquino as they moved on comrades-in-arms dedicated to overturning the president’s government. Gunfire cracked and…
31 August 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Aug 31 – Manila’s stock markets held steady in the first session after Friday’s coup attempt, but businessmen and analysts polled by Reuters said the most serious threat so far to President Corazon Aquino’s rule was a warning to her to quickly assert control of…
Exactly two years ago we ran a cover story on India’s skills crisis. This was just after Subramanian Ramadorai was named Adviser to the Prime Minister in the National Council on Skill Development. How quickly have we moved down the skilling highway? Glacially slow, and frighteningly so. For a nation where tens of millions of…
In 1908, when Henry Ford began making his revolutionary Model Ts on an assembly line in Detroit, there were 241 carmakers in the United States. (In comparison, India has 20 carmakers in 2013). “I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the…
From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT-YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
From the Editor We need to place the AgustaWestland helicopter “kerfuffle”- as a former defence minister put it- in context. The 12 AW101s were headed for the Indian Air Force’s Communication Squadron, which flies VVIPs around. to replace its ageing Mi-8 fleet. The new helicopters are strictly not combat craft-they are personnel carriers and can…
From the Editor The word “flurry” is used to describe a sudden blast or gust, or a sudden commotion, and it. has been used frequently to label the announcements from the government’s blunderbuss over the past three weeks. My dictionary also tells me flurry is the “death-agony of the whale”, but we don’t want that,…
Hindustan Times on Saturday was launched on June 3 last year. It was a unique product and an unqualified success. Unique, because no other newspaper published a bespoke Saturday edition. Unqualified, because readers have been lured to it in huge numbers, and have stayed for the weekend. HT on Saturday acknowledges the 21st-century urban Indian…
I experienced my epiphany about consumer media a couple of years ago on a Tokyo subway. When I lived in Japan in the mid-1990s, commuters would be bent earnestly over their little pulp paper backs or Manga comics. Now, just over a decade later, everyone’s fingers are flying over buttons on little machines that are…
New Age Guru peps up India story believers “When you were five years old, you were happy nearly all the time. Somebody had to make you unhappy Now you are 30-plus and have achieved your dreams, and you are unhappy all the time. Somebody has to make you happy” Delegates at the India Economic Summit…
Two days after he and a brother judge handed down a blistering verdict in the Centre for Public Interest Litigation & Others vs Union of India & Others case, cancelling 122 telecom licences and severely indicting a former minister, now a jailbird, Justice ASOK KUMAR GANGULY was at peace in his study at home, behind…
‘My Objective and My Company’s Objective is to be Future Ready’ YOGESH CHANDER DEVESHWAR has been with ITC for nearly 43 years. The past 15 years as chairman and chief executive. Having turned ITC into a multi-product company no longer synonymous with cigarettes, he is seeking a five-year extension during which a successor will be…